Bootstrap Theme for MT is a Theme powered by Twitter Bootstrap and the ThemeManager plugin. It is a fully responsive theme, which means that that the layout automatically adjusts to suit the screen, so it looks great and readable on smartphone, tablets, as well as laptop/desktop browsers. Bootstrap Theme is based largely on The Bootstrap theme for Wordpress, so much of the credit goes to Konstantin Obenland.

Bootstrap Theme Demo

MT Hacks was recently updated to use Bootstrap Theme, browse the site to check out features. Be sure to try it on a tablet or smartphone too. Also, a demo/dev site can be seen here.

Features

Version 1.0 of Bootstrap Theme is designed to be simple and easy to setup. More features may be added in future. The theme supports Facebook Comments (optional) - support for MT commenting may come in a future version. Bootstrap Theme has customizable menus and sidebar widgets, as well a host of other Theme Options:

This plugin fixes an issue introduced with Google Chrome v17 that causes admin entry previews to display a blank screen.

This seems to happen only when the entry contains img tags with fully qualified src URLs from the same domain as the MT install. For some reason, Chrome now suspects this to be an XSS attack and will not render the iframe with he entry preview.

This plugin adds a response header that tells Chrome to skip its XSS checking for this request. It only adds this for admin Entry Previews.

The Twitter Tools plugin for Movable Type enables you to easily and automatically share your MT entries on Twitter. The plugin pushes tweets directly to Twitter immediately when entries are published, avoiding the delays of other services. Future versions of the plugin will add additional Twitter integration features.

Post New Entries to Twitter Within Seconds of Publishing

There are a number of free services out there that will automatically share your entries to your Twitter stream. In most cases, these services work by periodically checking your blog's RSS feed for new entries to post. While this works, it means a time lag or delay before new items get posted to Twitter. The delays get worse and more frequent when these services become popular. TwitterFeed has over 1,000,000 users -- because they have so many RSS feeds to check, it can often be a long time before they get around to yours. The Twitter Tools plugin solves this delay problem by pushing the tweets directly from MT, immediately, when the entry is published.

How it Works

The plugin is pretty simple. After installing the plugin, you authorize MT to auto-tweet when new entries are published. After that, every new entry gets tweeted quickly and directly and automatically.

Post to both blog and author Twitter feeds at the same time. This is great for multi-author blogs, or if you want to post to both your person Twitter account and to your blog's Twitter account.

Optional Filters can be used to only tweet entries with specific Categories or Tags

Optional customized Tweet text for each entry (the default is the Entry title).

Option to use your own Twitter App, enabling you to customize the "via" text and link shown in Tweet metadata

More features are work-in-progress, including importing tweets and more.

Template Tags

Twitter Tools includes one new template tag:

<mt:EntryTwitterShortURL> - Outputs the short URL created when the entry was tweeted (using the URL shortener of your choice). You can use this template tag to display the short URL to your readers and/or integrate it into Twitter share links or Tweet Buttons -- great for analytics, as your readers use the the same short URL as you do. Note: if the entry was not tweeted by Twitter Tools, this tag will output an empty string. This tag also works on PHP-dynamic templates.

Requirements

All required modules are included in the download file for Twitter Tools. See installation steps below.

Installation

Download and extract the zip file, then upload the contents of the 'plugins' directory into the 'plugins' directory of your Movable Type installation (often /cgi-bin/mt/plugins/).

Upload the contents of the 'extlib' directory into the 'extlib' directory of your Movable Type installation (often /cgi-bin/mt/extlib/).

Upload the contents of the 'mt-static' directory into the 'mt-static' directory used by your Movable Type installation.

Go to the blog-level plugin settings for Twitter Tools and click the Signin with Twitter button to authorize your blog to post to Twitter.

Return to the settings once again and click the "Auto-tweet" setting to enable auto-posting to Twitter, and adjust other settings as desired.

(Optional for Pro) Authors can also connect their MT author profile with a Twitter account by choosing the "Twitter Account" item from the left menu of their user profile. Note that entries will be posted to Twitter only if "auto-tweet" is enabled in blog settings for the plugin.

The Facebook Tools plugin for Movable Type enables you to easily and automatically share your MT entries on Facebook. The plugin pushes updates directly to Facebook immediately when entries are published, avoiding the delays of other services. Future versions of the plugin will add additional Facebook integration features.

Post New Entries to Facebook Within Seconds of Publishing

There are a number of free services out there that will automatically share your entries to Facebook. In most cases, these services work by periodically checking your blog's RSS feed for new entries to post. While this works, it means a time lag or delay before new items get posted to Facebook. The delays get worse and more frequent when these services become popular. TwitterFeed has over 1,000,000 users and NetworkedBlogs has over 300,000 -- because they have so many RSS feeds to check, it can often be a long time before they get around to yours. The Facebook Tools plugin solves this delay problem by pushing the Facebook updates directly from MT, immediately, when the entry is published.

How it Works

The plugin is pretty simple. First you register your Facebook Application (easy to do, takes less than a minute) and then authorize MT to post updates when new entries are published. After that, every new entry gets pushed to Facebook quickly and directly and automatically. The updates include an image from your entries (if present).

Facebook Tools Pro

With Facebook Tools Pro, you get the following extra features:

Post updates to Facebook Pages instead of user profiles

Post to both blog and author profiles at the same time. This is great for multi-author blogs, or if you want to post to both your person profile and to your blog's Facebook Page.

Optional Filters can be used to only share entries with specific Categories or Tags

Optional customized status message for each entry (the default is the Entry title).

Option to use a different Facebook App for each blog in your system.

Requirements

Most required modules are included in the download file for Facebook Tools. Because the Facebook API uses "Oauth 2.0", it must use SSL. As such, one of following are required (plus any dependancies), but may already be installed by default on your server:

If your system doesn't not already have one of these, note that the latter is known to be easier to install.

Installation

Download and extract the zip file, then upload the contents of the 'plugins' directory into the 'plugins' directory of your Movable Type installation (often /cgi-bin/mt/plugins/).

Upload the contents of the 'mt-static' directory into the 'mt-static' directory used by your Movable Type installation.

Create a Facebook Application. This is easier than it sounds, and it only few settings are needed here. Choose a name for your App, which can be the same name as your blog. The upload a Logo and an icon image -- of these the icon is more important. (if you want you can use my Logo image and my icon image.) Then click on the "Website" tab on the left, and fill the "Site URL" field with the domain of your admin MT login eg. http://www.mydomain.com. Then save the settings, you can leave the rest of the settings the way they are.

Copy the "Application ID" and "Application Secret" in the settings for the plugin, then save the settings.

Return to the blog-level plugin settings and click the Facebook Connect button to authorize your blog to post to Facebook. The Facebook authorization dialog will ask for the necessary permissions, click "Allow". After authorization, if using the Pro version of the plugin, you will be given an option to choose one of your administered Facebook Pages to post updates to.

Return to the settings once again and click the "Auto-Share" setting to enable auto-posting to Facebook, and adjust other settings as desired.

(Optional for Pro) Authors can also connect their MT author profile with a Facebook account by choosing the "Facebook Account" item from the left menu of their user profile. Note that entries will be posted to Facebook only if "auto-share" is enabled in blog settings for the plugin.

For legacy reasons, Movable Type and Melody publish future or "scheduled posts" by way of a periodic task. In short, these means that periodically MT will checked to see if there are any entries with a Scheduled status that have come due, and then publish them. A side-effect of this is that in most cases an entry scheduled for 10:30 won't actually publish until 10:46 or 11:15, or even later (depending on your MT configuration and other periodic tasks).

But what if the post is time-sensitive, and you really want that post to live at 10:30?

This plugin aims to address this by creating a "TheSchwartz" job to publish the post. When the entry is saved, a job gets created for the entry, configured to run at desired publishing date and time. Combine this with running the run-periodic-tasks in daemon mode and scheduled posts should publish very close to the scheduled time.

I have created a version of Twitter's new official Tweet Button that works as a Chrome Extension. With this extension you can view the Tweet Count and Share the page for all web pages, even pages that don't have embedded tweet buttons.

The Tweet Count shows in red over the T icon to the right of the address bar, so you immediately know how how many tweets the page has received. If you want to Tweet it, just click on the icon and Twitter's official share box will appear, the same way it would if you had clicked a Tweet Button embedded on the page itself.

A year ago, I created a Greasemonkey user script that displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are searching for at the top of Google search results.

Today I have created one that does the same thing for Google Buzz results:

This works in both FireFox and Chrome.

Currently, the Buzz results are restricted to actual Buzz updates -- it excludes updates that are imported from other services sich as Twitter, Google Reader, RSS feeds, etc. This seemed to provide the best experience, but a future version may have options/settings for adjusting this. Buzz results are presented in plain text, limited to the first 140 characters, so they don't take up too much screen space on the Google results page. A "more »" link appears when the Buzz has additional text or media (links, images, etc.).

The Buzz results are powered by the Buzzzy API. A big thanks to the creators of Buzzzy for there work in creating a search engine and API for Buzz updates!

What about a Google Wave plugin for Movable Type, as a way to engage in real-time conversations about blog entries. What do think? Below is just a test, you should see an embedded Wave. If you have a Google Wave account, please join the wave and share your thoughts. (I don't have any Google Wave invites, sorry).
One of the interesting things about using a Wave for blog comments is that after you join a wave on a blog site, that Wave will show up in your Google Wave inbox going forward. This enables you rejoin the conversation later directly from within Wave. Some bloggers may worry that this may mean less return traffic to their sites, which could be true, but it certainly could boost the amount of discussion around blog entries.

Twitter Commenters is a plugin for Movable Type that enables commenters to sign-in and comment on your blog using their Twitter account. Versions 2+ includes support for Twitter's OAuth authorization system and enables commenters to automatically share their comments to their Twitter stream.

Note: Version 2.1 fixes a serious bug when using OAuth, users would get a Comment Submission Error, saying that Name and Email are required. All sites running v2.0 should upgrade to v2.1 using the download link below. Simply upload the new files, no need to adjust settings or templates

Basic Auth (default):

OAuth:

Twitter comment authentication works like other auth methods in MT -- once you have installed the plugin you can enable Twitter as one of the auth options, as shown in the image above.

How It Works - Basic Auth

When the user enters their Twitter username and password in the form (shown above), the plugin submits those to the Twitter API to verfiy the credentials. If verified, the user can then post comments using their Twitter account. Their Twitter 'display name' will be shown beside their comments, and their Twitter avatar (profile photo) will be imported and shown beside their comments (if userpics are enabled in your templates).

Note that users' Twitter passwords are not stored in the MT database. An upcoming version of this plugin will enable Twitter's new OAuth support, in which case passwords would never be sent to MT at all. That version will like have an option for commenters to cc. their comments to their Twitter account. Stay tuned.

How It Works - OAuth

New in Version 2.0, you can optionally enable Twitter's new OAuth authorization system. With OAuth, user never have to submit their password info to your server. Instead, they click a "sign in with Twitter" button and they are taken to a page on Twitter.com asking them to authorize the application (see image above). One they click "Allow" they are returned to your site and they then post comments using their Twitter account. As with basic auth, their Twitter 'display name ' will be used as well as their Twitter avatar (profile photo).

Share Comments on Twitter

A new feature in version 2.0, only supported via OAuth, enables commenters to optionally share their comment to their Twitter stream. All they have to do is click a checkbox, no need to re-authorize or enter Twitter account info.

Net::Twitter 2.07 perl module (included with plugin) (note: do not upgrade to version 2.9+ of this module)

Net::Twitter::OAuth perl module (included with plugin)

Net::OAuth perl module (included with plugin)

Net::OAuth::Simple perl module (included with plugin)

JSON::Any perl (included with plugin)

Note: Net::Twitter requires newer versions of the libwww-perl collection of Perl modules. I am not sure what the minimum version required is, but on my server, I had to upgrade in order to get Net::Twitter to work. So if you get strange errors, try installing the latest version in your 'extlib' directory of your MT. Update: A common error message is: "Can't locate object method "default_header" via package "LWP::UserAgent" -- if you see this error, this the problem.

Download Twitter Commenters

Downloads: 571

Installation

Upload the contents of the 'plugins' folder to the 'plugins' directory for your MT install.

Upload the contents of the 'mt-static' folder to your 'mt-static' directory.

For each blog you want to enable, go to Preferences > Registration and check the box for 'Twitter'.

Enabling Twitter OAuth

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it could be, maybe Twitter will make it easier in future. To set this up you need to create an Application on Twitter:

For 'Callback URL' enter the full URL to your comments script followed by '?__mode=login_external&key=Twitter'. Example: http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=login_external&key=Twitter

For 'Default Access type' choose 'Read & Write'.

Check the box for 'Yes, use Twitter for login'

Hit the 'Save' button.

After saving the application, you should now see a screen with a 'Consumer key' and 'Consumer secret'. Copy those to the system plugin Settings (System Overview > Plugins > Twitter Commenters > Settings). and save the plugin settings.

To enable the share comment on Twitter option, add the <mt:TwitterShareCommentOption> tag below the comment text part of your comment form. This will display a checkbox option to people logged in via Twitter OAuth.

Rebuild your entry pages and test it out

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Follow @mthacks on Twitter for updates and other MT and Twitter hacks.